Sad times. Maybe even end times. The vultures are circling. The barbarians are at the gate and everything that was once sacred is being made profane. Mohammed ben Sulayem, the president of the FIA, believes recent controversies are beginning to damage the sport. Toto Wolff, the team principal of Mercedes, identifies “a problem for the whole of Formula One”. The global head of Ford Performance Motorsport has reminded Red Bull of the “very high standards of behaviour and integrity” that will be expected of their future engine partner. Who else, in this moment of turmoil and tumult, will stand up for the impeccable good name and sound values of the sport Christian Horner described only last year as “the Kardashians on wheels”?
Certainly it has been vaguely amusing over the last few weeks to behold some of the moral squeamishness and knotted indignation generated within the paddock by the Horner affair. The apparent surprise that a product packaged and sold as a schlocky personal soap opera has somehow degenerated into a schlocky personal soap opera. The sheer disbelief that a sport owned and run by rich, unaccountable men and held in some of the world’s most repressive dictatorships might occasionally be lacking in transparency. The belated discovery that there might actually be such a thing as bad publicity, negative publicity, the kind of publicity that does not emerge fully formed from the editing suite, complete with pumping soundtrack and pre-written storylines.
Even now, Horner still gets it better than anyone else. The show must go on. The animal must be fed. There he was in Bahrain on the opening weekend of the new season, toasting Max Verstappen’s latest victory, making a public show of solidarity for the cameras with his wife, Geraldine, urging everyone to “move on” from the investigation that cleared him of coercive behaviour against a female employee and the subsequent leak of as yet unverified messages and images purportedly relating to the case.
In the background, meanwhile, the usual shadow circus of noises on and noises off. If in a more enlightened world this might have been an opportunity to sharpen the lines of accountability and responsibility within the sport, even reflect on its power structures and gender imbalances, then perhaps it was ultimately inevitable that we would instead retreat into the more comfortable territory of gossip and intrigue, politicking and bickering. Did you hear that Toto and Jos Verstappen went to dinner the other night? Could Max be heading to Mercedes? Where does all this leave Adrian Newey?
But this is what happens when a sport essentially becomes indistinguishable from the content it produces. For all the portentous headlines, the pearl-clutching from rival teams and calls to action from fans and pundits, it’s worth pondering exactly what sort of moral leadership anyone was really entitled to expect here. Perhaps the same leadership F1 showed back in 2020, when the Haas driver Nikita Mazepin – the son of the Russian billionaire sponsoring his team – was allowed to keep his seat despite posting a video to Instagram of him appearing to commit a sexual assault. Perhaps it was the leadership Ben Sulayem showed last year in seemingly defending comments written on his personal website that he did not like “women who think they are smarter than men”.
Perhaps it was the kind of moral leadership Horner himself showed in 2022, when he attributed the sport’s new young female fans to “all these great-looking young drivers”. Or the kind of leadership deployed against the harassment of female fans that continues apace both online and at the track. Or the kind of leadership that preaches the gospel of environmental sustainability while fattening the calendar to a record 24 races, including more than ever before at night.
Of course in this respect the current custodians of F1 are simply following in the rich leadership tradition of their forebears: pissy man-children like Max Mosley and Bernie Ecclestone, under whose watch the sport thrived and flourished on a tide of tobacco money, confected controversies and grubby alliances with some of the planet’s worst regimes. For apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, read Saudi Arabia, Qatar, China, Azerbaijan, Bahrain or Abu Dhabi today. And people say F1 has lost touch with its heritage.
But then this has always been the point: an unashamed paean to wealth and indulgence, a sport whose huge costs and global footprint render it dependent on identifying the most lucrative income streams at any given moment, and asking as few questions as possible about them. There is no pyramid here, no community asset to protect, no grassroots to nurture. Nobody goes down the park at the weekend to play a little F1 with their mates. Your chances of racing an F1 car are roughly equal to your chances of going into space. This is a show that serves up visceral, unimaginable thrills on a near-weekly basis. But anyone searching for virtue or moral rectitude is not remotely engaging with this sport on its own terms.
How this particular peccadillo ends is anyone’s guess. There may come a point when even Horner, the count of controversy, realises he has picked one too many fights over the years. The brand is the thing, and ultimately the scent of corporate gore may just provide irresistible content for season seven of Drive to Survive. Live by the scripted entertainment product, die by the scripted entertainment product, I suppose. Either way, we can only hope that Formula One can restore its cherished reputation in time for this weekend’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
